SBF was founded by Qurat ul Ain in 2002 with the goal of helping entrepreneurs leverage the power of the internet to grow their businesses. From its humble beginnings with five how-to guides, SBF now boasts thousands of high-quality articles tackling the topics that entrepreneurs need to understand in order to succeed.

In 2015, Ryan Kh was tapped as the CEO of SBF. His background in managing a variety of small business websites, blogs and social media channels has been invaluable in expanding the reach of SBF. The added visibility has allowed our community to grow into a go-to destination for thought leaders and influencers to share their latest insights.

If you would like to share your unique perspective on the challenging journey to entrepreneurial success, we’d love to hear from you!

Our Journey to Success

A recurring theme at SBF is that success isn’t a straight path. There are twists and turns, and moments where every entrepreneur feels like throwing in the towel. Our team has experienced those same ups and downs that our readers are going through.

Dec 1, 2003

SustainableBusinessForum.com is registered and Wordpress is installed. We had a message, and understood a few things about the blogging space, but we didn’t realize the journey we were starting on.

February 3, 2004

After nearly 2 years of publishing a few articles a week to a small, but loyal audience, we organically started to see a boom in backlinks to our content. Visitors started to arrive from major sites discussing issues impacting entrepreneurs. And, as a result, our site content began to appear in more organic search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

May 23, 2004

To help meet demand for fresh content, we started working with business schools at universities around the world. Through partnerships with professors, we were able to allow students to share their knowledge learned in the classroom to an international audience. These innovative articles proved powerful - the perspective of students learning the latest strategies in the classroom offered a fresh, unique surge of content for readers that hadn’t attended business school themselves.

November 18, 2008

Featured as guest speakers at NYU’s Stern New Venture and Social Venture Competitions. Our seminar specifically focused on the power of leveraging organic traffic using white hat strategies in a competitive digital space.

October 2013

To further improve the editorial content of our site, we hired a small but motivated team of experienced entrepreneurs to join a Think Tank. The resulting content has served as cornerstone content. By allowing a diverse team to work together on featured stories, we’ve blown the lid off some pretty challenging topics involving entrepreneurship and scaling a successful online startup.

December 3, 2015

After an extended search for a CEO to continue our mission, Ryan Kh accepted the position. His fresh perspective guided by decades of content marketing experience has allowed us to continue to outperform the market

June 2017

After more than a decade of utilizing Wordpress, we migrated to Laravel. WP is amazing for starting out, but it’s hard to beat the security, speed and user experience that the Laravel ecosystem can power. Of course, this meant a ton of work for our two-man dev team, but a few sleeplessness nights got everything pushed through.

We also chose to completely refresh our content, trimming and updating outdated information. This meant a significant investment from the editorial team, but we feel that delivering exceptional content is worth any cost. And we want to ensure that every article we curate is hyper-focused on helping small business and entrepreneurs scale at warp speed.

The View from the Summit

For us, the path to financial sustainability took more than two years. We had to tackle serious technical headaches, like the day a Wordpress plugin crashed our entire site and we realized our latest backup was more than 60 days out-of-date.

By staying the course and evolving with every change in both blogging and online business, we’ve been able to maintain relevance over the years. Building a site like SBF takes thousands of hours, gallons of sweat, blood and tears.

But, as any entrepreneur will tell you, the view from the top of the mountain is worth the climb. And all of this wouldn’t be possible without readers and contributors like you.

We hope our site has been useful to you. If you’d like to thank our team of volunteers in a meaningful way, please take a moment to “like” us on Facebook and “follow” us on Twitter.